Data and information are rapidly becoming the life blood of enterprises. Transactions with customers, operational data, financial data, corporate intelligence data; in fact, all types of information are now captured, indexed, stored, and mined by enterprises in today's highly competitive and world economy.
Since information is vital to the enterprise, it is often made available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred sixty-five days a year. To achieve this, the enterprises have to implement a variety of data replication, data backup, and data versioning techniques against their data models, users' storage devices, and/or their data warehouses.
It is not unusual for an enterprise to expend roughly $6 for every gigabyte (GB) of data storage used for data backup and replication per year. This is a best case scenario and does not include the management overhead, risk associated with data loss, restore overhead in the event of data loss, periodic tape drive cleansing overhead/cost, higher recover times when data is lost, etc.
In fact, assuming an enterprise has 10,000 employees each employee having a modest 20 GB of data, then the cost of data backup and replication is $1,200,000 (20×$6×10,000). Again, this is best case scenario and does not even account for a variety of overhead costs, which were discussed above. Thus, it can be seen that data backup and replication for medium to large enterprises can easily be in the millions of dollars and can affect the enterprise's bottom line in any year but most especially during tough or lean years.
Additionally, many users of an enterprise never fully utilize their existing storage capacity. Still, the enterprise has to retain sufficient backup space to account for the situation when a user does fully utilize his/her storage capacity. So, the reality is and enterprise not only expends a lot of time, resources, and money on data backup and replication but the enterprise is also wasting and underutilizing a lot of existing storage capacity.
Thus, it is desirable to have improved techniques for data backup and replication within enterprises.